The mechanics of individuality in nature. II. Barriers, cells, and individuality

Abstract

The cell theory of Schleiden and Schwann is generalized to the effect that throughout the natural world, in physics, biology, and sociopsychology, there is a widespread phenomenon of the existence of organized cells, whose organization is usually protected by barriers. These barriers exist not only in space, but in time and even in other domains. These barriers typically not only protect the organization within the cell from external disturbance, but they actively participate in reducing the internal disorganization. It appears that the quantum phase cell or its equivalent, the discrete quantum state, may be a physical analog of the organized biological cell. The sampling and ambiguity theorems of communication theory throw new light on phase cells. The quantum phase cell has both configuration and momentum elements, which are analogous respectively to the somatic elements in the cytoplasm of a cell and the genetic elements in the DNA. A biological cell or organism, a physical quantum state, and a human being as a sociopsychological entity each has a natural individuality. A natural individuality is a somewhat mysterious thing, since in addition to specificity, it also involves stochasticity and complementarity. There are some striking and unexplained spin-analog characteristics in biology which have a relation to boson- and fermion-analog characteristics in biology that corresponds with the known relation in physics. The hypothesis suggested in our earlier paper, that quantum mechanical entropy is diminished in interaction, is clarified and sharpened in this paper.